2014 Autumn Color Workshop

Just a few weeks ago, my 2014 field workshop series came to a fabulous finale. An outstanding group of photographers joined me at Iowa’s gorgeous Ledges State Park for my annual Autumn Color Photography workshop. I’ve been holding this workshop here for several years, and have found both the location to be tremendously popular with the participants and the Iowa DNR organization excellent to work with.

While some years in the past have brought rain, frigid temps, or in one year even really high temps, this year it was a lovely day. The morning was cool and damp (for just a few minutes around sunrise, some donned their camera rain covers, but many didn’t even bother), it was overcast much of the day (perfect for autumn macro and “nature portraits”), then cleared off and became a little breezy in the afternoon (not ideal but we were having too much fun by then to even notice).

The group ranged from novices who were just starting out, to a semi-pro or two, as is often the case with my workshops. It’s always fun to have a range of experience in the group, as we work together throughout the day and learn from each other. For the first time, I conducted my demos not with an SLR as in years past, but with my Fujifilm X-Pro1 mirrorless camera. Also for the first time, there was another mirrorless camera user in the group. Not that the DSLR vs. mirrorless issue means much – or anything at all – for the photographic content of the workshop. I’m just always interested in cameras and it’s interesting to see the mirrorless cameras taking hold in the US. (For that matter, for those of you who may like to keep track, the workshop was dominated with Canon shooters, with only two or three Nikon users in the mix; usually it’s fairly balanced between those two brands, but not this time. And unlike most of my field workshops, there were no Sony or Pentax users present; generally we see a couple of these). Regardless, we had no major malfunctions and no one knocked over their tripod in the stream, so equipment-wise it was also a fantastic day.

Several of the participants forwarded images from the day for me to share here. Please take a few minutes and view the photos. The group created an excellent body of work that day, and we had a fun time doing so. I hope the participants learned some things along the way, as well.

If you’d like to see more, please also check out my Peterson Photo Workshops flickr group, where quite a number of additional participants have posted work from the day. And wow, there are also some outstanding images shared there as well!

To all the participants in this workshop, thanks for participating and for sharing your photos – I look forward to working with you again sometime next year.